Ex Uno Plures
by the anomaly
Summary: Always the self expands, wider and wider to admit the ones we love. Hank and Charles' relationship through the years. Set across X-Men: First Class, X-Men: Days Of Future Past and X-Men: Apocalypse. Warning: Drug use.


**Disclaimer:** Not real, not mine, not making money from this.

 _And yet when I looked upon that ugly idol in the glass, I was conscious of no repugnance, rather of a leap of welcome. This too was myself._ – _Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ by Robert Louis Stevenson

You're perfect, his parents told him, you're beautiful, and he would scoff inwardly while maintaining a bright, apologetic grin. Beautiful? With these feet? You've got to be joking, right? Because Hank had thought he'd known beauty. The unravelling of a differential equation, a best-fit curve snug between data points falling to its left and right, these had been the principle sources of his aesthetic pleasure. However, whatever satisfaction they had accorded paled in comparison to what the past month has taught him: the whistles and whirrs of Cerebro coming to life, Raven's hair as the morning sun shone through, spun gold between his fingers. Charles' cheeks, pink with exertion after their run, his grey sweater damp in places, his heaving chest a shifting Rorschach of possibilities.

Hank touches his face, smooth and pale in the mirror, one might think to recognise desire.

* * *

Hank comes alive in the in-between spaces. With Erik gone, and Raven with him, Hank and Charles make do with what is left. Then the war claims Alex and, later, with smug permanence, Sean, and Charles is bereft. Two sets of cutlery, two placemats at dinner, a water goblet surreptitiously taking the place of the obligatory wine glass, Hank is fastidious about such spurious details, as if somehow they could make amends for grief. Charles smiles, says nothing, takes to locked doors and whiskey on an empty stomach.

When the school first opened, Hank proved himself a valuable teacher. He presented knowledge without condescendence; he was kind and infinitely patient with the weaker students, if only a little too self-conscious. Charles noted this and praised him appropriately. He wished to coax the nascent magnificence that he spied in Hank out into the world, dormant from years of self-deprecation. He marvelled at Hank's flair for administrative duties. When the war began to leach the school of its students and staff, Hank soldiered on unfazed. His determination, once infectious, now grated on Charles' nerves. Charles remembers sweeping the students' files off Hank's desk, but Hank never even blushed a hint of blue. Instead, he stepped over the strewn paperwork, wheeled a still yelling Charles out of the study, eased one arm beneath Charles' knees and looped the other snug around his shoulders, and slipped the now quiet man beneath the covers.

Hank has always been good at conflict resolution. When Charles finally breaks, Hank provides an efficient, if inelegant, pharmaceutical solution.

Did anyone tell you how the ends of your sentences dissolve into–, Charles waves his hand in the air, for lack of a word. Hank is pleased, to be the premise for something Charles cannot place.

Yes.

You should finish your sentences. Charles' eyes are glazed, with the drug or sadness Hank does not know. Best not to dwell on it. Turn the page, shift the mood.

He adjusts his spectacles. Well, tell me, Professor, what do you need to know?

Charles laughs.

* * *

 _Yes_.

Because that's Hank's universal reply. Things that run the gamut of a leaky bathroom ceiling, a homesick student, frantic parents, and now Charles, delirious and needy in the middle of the night. As always Hank supplies the affirmative. Armed with a pocketful of useless theories and a slightly awkward if genuine concern for anyone who comes his way, Hank McCoy is everyone's handyman. Yes, rest assured we'll do our best for your child. Yes, just sign on the dotted line, please. Yes, Charles I'm sure I could fix that. And now with his face inches away from the man he loves, crying and incoherent, Hank offers the smallest of concessions, yeah, Charles, I think we can figure it out, even when he knows it is impossible to reverse the accumulation of the past's deficits, and Charles collapses onto his chest.

Hank hovers his lips over Charles' ear, almost touching. He pulls back at the last moment.

* * *

Back at the lab, Hank prepares this month's supply of the serum, feigning nonchalance at the alterations that he had just made to accommodate Charles' increasing dependency. Funny thing, self-consciousness, it persists even when there is no apparent audience. He hasn't had to worry about Charles reading his mind for quite a while now. Hank does not know whether to be concerned or relieved and decides upon neither, preferring instead to concentrate his thoughts on the material necessities of survival. A food run later that afternoon, he thinks, once again putting off his resolution to secure a lock on the liquor cabinet as he tucks the wheelchair away into the storage closet. All these petty machinations that have begun to disgust him but which he persists in following to the letter day after day.

It still unsettles him, hearing Charles' unsteady steps down the hallways.

Charles doesn't need his powers to figure out what Hank is thinking. While Erik has always been a clear proponent of embracing one's natural state, what shackles Hank isn't so much primal instinct as its clinical opposite. Damned cold rationality. It would be easier to sate a man's appetite than to cure Hank of his twisted devotion to asceticism, this calculated reliance that he has concocted for them both. Hank measures out just enough reprieve for the evening, lets loose the fire in Charles' veins and quells the clamour in his head for a little while, just a little while and no longer. To confess, in self-flagellating excess, all the better to condemn in the next breath. For Hank is never completely well-meaning. Anyone with that much repressed anger at the world can never be.

Still, Charles won't begrudge him his devotions. He knows how tightly Hank still clings to the long bygone dream of all of them together, himself, Raven, Sean, Alex, Angel even, careless and carefree, all of them his students once more. He knows how much of a performance Hank's role as a teacher is. He knows Hank's irrevocable fidelity to classical notions of beauty, the golden mean of his intellectual pursuits that struggle to remain unsullied by the rising decrepit of the mansion, that now only serve to feed his addiction.

And that one sick thought that this was what he'd always wanted.

* * *

Hank has brought the next dose. He looks across the room and meets Charles' expectant gaze.

You're drinking too much. I told you, it interferes with the serum.

Hank pries the bottle away from Charles' fingers with a studied strength. How must it feel, Charles wonders, to be afraid of one's physical prowess. He doesn't get very far. Empathy eludes him these days.

That's quite enough, Charles.

Charles tries swatting away Hank's prying hands, to no avail, and finally surrenders the bottle. It was almost empty anyway. Besides, it's almost time for his next dose. He can stare down the next thirty minutes half sober, he thinks.

Charles, we need to talk.

Charles laughs. He gestures vaguely at the disorder around them, strewn needles, half-empty bottles abandoned on their sides, as if to say, aren't we somewhat beyond polite conversation?

Hank swallows uncomfortably. Fine, he says, a little too quickly. Just like everything else, his growing concern about Charles' health can wait, as can his unspoken fear of anything that will break them out of this wretched yet somehow enviable situation where both of them are suspended in historical Limbo, overlooked by the war and ignored by the humans, for once. It is a case of debt indefinitely deferred, and Hank is not by any chance eager for a closing of the ledger anytime soon.

He means no harm; he only needs Charles to curl up in his arms like this as he waits for the needle, just for a little while longer.

Charles closes his eyes and leans in. He hasn't showered in a week. Hank pushes away the hair from his face, rough with stubble, pale from want of natural light. Charles, who had taken every single one of them to bed (Moira, Erik, _Raven_ ) at least once, who had never once shown anything other than a clinical fascination with his condition, whose expressions of affection towards him had never ventured beyond the fraternal, now pushes the tip of his nose deeper into the crook of his shoulder and _giggles_.

Oh, Charles.

Tell me, Hank, do you ever get sick of being so fucking responsible?

Hank, wordless, applies needle to vein. He'd always been ready with the syringe, too eager, perhaps, to administer oblivion.

* * *

Charles forgets himself. That is to say, he meets his future self and forgets or rather forgoes his present infirmities to become the inspiring leader that Logan says he will be. The voices return. Hank can almost see Charles hearing them again, a wince he tries to ignore, a private smile that he may have imagined.

To be is a constant forgetting. It ties him up in knots, this paradoxical model of a Charles in perpetual becoming running parallel to the fixed idol that Logan almost worships from the future. He is taken by a most petulant jealousy, that Logan gets to know _two_ Charleses, when he only has the privilege of loving _one_.

Charles has fallen asleep at his desk again, pages from the latest draft of the new curriculum between his fingers, beneath his hair. Hank picks them out slowly and Charles stirs, smiles fondly at him as he carries him to the bed. No more drunken half-conversations now, no more physical contact under the pretence of caretaking. What remains is a distal proximity distilled of desire. Charles is warm and soft in his arms. Suddenly he is reminded of Raven, sitting with perfect composure on his lap as she peered down the microscope, his panic slowly giving way to pleasure and arousal, her turning around to place her lips on his.

He lingers at the door.

I am very glad you are here, Hank.

Sorry I– I thought you were asleep–

I was. Thank you, Hank. And even though he knows his instruction will be disobeyed Charles can't help but say, don't stay up too late in the lab.

Hank finds himself disinfecting the chair again every night, before going back to his blueprints for the warplane that he hopes will never see war.

* * *

Then comes En Sabah Nur, the threat of apocalypse, and Hank's fears are proven right at last. There will always be war. And emerging from the margins every now and then is Erik, the unacknowledged cynosure of both Charles' and Raven's preoccupations, once again commanding all of their attention.

Hank wants to know, why are we always pulling Erik out of fires? Why can't we be content with just ourselves? And the most pressing question of all: isn't what we've built enough, am _I_ not enough? At the end of the day, Hank is but a foot-soldier, a pawn on the chessboard of greater men, a figurant in the background prized for his loyalty and intellect but a figurant nonetheless. Because even after everything, Charles loves Erik best. The betrayal on the beach in Cuba, the loss of his legs, Erik's conditioned penchant for destruction that frequently escalates to a global scale, none of it manages to even make a dent in Charles' devotion to the hope that one day Erik will return to the fold. Charles _, ex uno plures_ , has a mind large enough to encompass the whole world's comings and goings, its griefs and loves and trials and charities. Yet, he will always harbour a special indulgence for Erik, the lone renegade who claims fraternity with his mutant brothers and sisters but who can never see past his own selfish prejudices.

En Sabah Nur is The First Light. Charles is telepathically connected to all of the mutants. From one come many, and out of many, one. Hank is neither special nor ordinary; the most he can do is smash Cerebro's controls in with his fist when Charles is in pain. What Hank does not see is that this is exactly what he shares with Erik, this propensity for violence, submerged in himself and given free rein in the other, and alongside that, that which Charles hopes to nurture, their similar capacity for creation and restoration. _There is so much more to you than you know, not just pain and anger._ With every ugliness comes its obverse, with every awkward gesture some passing grace. The loved one is particular but never singular. Always the self expands, wider and wider to admit our affections, for they can be more than one. The self, after all, has plenty to go around.

* * *

Charles has lost his hair. With it he seems also to have lost some of his naivety, exchanged it, perhaps, for a hope tampered by wisdom. He has left Raven to oversee the training of the new X-Men.

Erik has gone. Hank is glad.

Alone in the lab, Hank's head suddenly jerks up. Yeah, I know, I know, I promised. Never to look inside your head. But all that self-loathing was getting too much to bear. You, the brightest amongst us all, feeling so unworthy. Charles tuts. Mockery? Admonishment? Hank shifts his weight from one foot to another. His shoulders slump. Charles' tone walks the knife-edge of sincerity. Hank, Hank, you should listen to Raven. And he thinks, how could you, you of all people, instruct me on who I should learn from– but Charles, ever the solicitous teacher, pauses mid-thought and smiles, and Hank can see from the glint in his eyes that the lesson isn't over.

I love you too, you know. And Hank waits, waits for the inevitable, _you are one of my oldest friends_ , with bated breath, but the words do not come, and he opens his eyes, a little dazed, to see Charles' hand coming up to the smallest piece of lint on the edge of his lab coat, dusting it away with a flick of his finger before wheeling off to his next class.


End file.
